Early Man (2018)

Nick Park's Early Man arrives with the full Aardman apparatus: plasticine figures, a Manchester-sized asteroid, and the revelation that cavemen invented football. The plot concerns a Stone Age tribe dispossessed of its lush valley by Bronze Age invaders who mine the place for ore, forcing a decisive match on the turf of the sacred sport. The stakes are the valley, or perpetual labor in the mines. This is a sports comedy wearing a loincloth, and it knows it.

The social content is thin but traceable. Goona, voiced by Maisie Williams, is a tomboyish vendor barred from the men's team who practices in secret and then coaches the cavemen to competence, a gentle thread about exclusion from the game that resolves in her favor without much fuss. Lord Nooth, all sneer and avarice, exploits his miners, profits from the gate, and attempts to flee with the crowd's admission money before his arrest, supplying a soft eat-the-rich beat that the film treats as villainy of the ordinary kind. The mining of the valley carries a faint environmental murmur, though the despoiling reads as generic empire-building. The voice cast includes several performers of color in supporting roles, none of them asked to comment on it.

What the film does not do is lecture. Critics strained to read the Stone versus Bronze conflict as an allegory for a certain recent British referendum, and the reading is available if you squint, but the film keeps its head down and its eye on the ball. There is no romantic subplot of note, no identity reckoning, no sermon. The fidgety caveman and the dim-witted ones are slapstick devices, not case studies. It is a modest, amiable picture that lost money to a larger superhero release and will be remembered, if at all, as the one where Nick Park made a football joke about the Pleistocene.